In the eighties, everything seemed to come together. Katz, along with Camden County banker Jerome Goodman, bought and turned around a pair of foundering small-town New Jersey banks, which they sold at a hefty profit. "The investments just mushroomed," he says, "but not as big as New York mushrooms, just South Jersey mushrooms."

As Florio rose out of Camden, Katz rose with him, heading fund-raising for Florio's successful campaign for governor in 1989, after which he became finance chairman of the state Democratic Party. Florio appointed Goodman as chairman of the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority, one of the most coveted titles in the state. And Katz began hatching schemes to bring his favorite team, the 76ers, to a planned arena in his hometown, in an effort to boost Camden's sagging economy. Plans for a new arena were on the drawing board when Republicans took over state government and scrapped the idea, Katz says.

Katz made his real killing by turning around Kinney Systems, a parking company in which he bought a small stake in the eighties. When it was on the verge of bankruptcy in late 1990, he bought out his partners for about $20 million. He set about renegotiating better leases with its biggest customers, New York real-estate moguls like Douglas Durst, Howard Milstein, and Samuel LeFrak. He sold the company to Central Parking last year for $225 million.

His Camden philanthropy grew with his fortune, from donating to the local Jewish Community Center to founding a Boys and Girls Club and even adopting a Vietnamese family of six. After two of his housekeepers invited him to the First Nazarene Baptist Church, he came back again and again. Last fall, he donated $50,000 to rebuild the church after a fire. Now he sometimes speaks during services, telling parishioners stories of his own rise from Camden's slums. "He has rubbed shoulders with the elite and the royalty of this country, and he still comes back to take care of the city of his birth," says the Reverend J. A. Jones.

Friends say Katz is well suited to his role as the public face of the Nets' new management. He has a distinctive taste in clothes, sometimes wearing yellow or electric-blue sports coats and bright-green boaters "that look like he just won the Masters," says his son Drew, 27. Among the political and business elite, he is famous for his practical jokes. He once rented a private airplane from his friend the Philadelphia 76ers owner Ed Snider and replaced all the decorations with pictures of himself and his friends, "so it looked to all the world like his plane," Snider says. (Katz later bought it.) Negotiating to sell a company to Monroe Carell, chairman of Central Parking Corporation, Katz left a message on Carell's home answering machine, "Monroe, the DNA came back, and it's your baby." His wife was good-natured about it, Carell says. Around the same time, Katz invited Carell to a "hockey game," which turned out instead to be a private dinner at a table with President Clinton.

"Lewis, you must not have had any toys as a child," Carell told him after the Nets deal was announced. "Because now that you have money, you are buying all these airplanes and basketball teams."